Research Article

Increasing Diversity in Emerging Non-religious Communities

Authors:

Christopher Hassall,

University of Leeds, GB

About Christopher

Ian Bushfield

NoneGB

Abstract

Contemporary growth in non-religious populations has given rise to novel communities with unique perspectives on social issues. We describe a study of diversity within speakers at conferences organised by and attended by the atheist community. We analyse trends in diversity of 630 speakers, corresponding to 1223 speaking slots at 48 conferences conducted for the purpose of discussing or espousing non-religious views over the period 2003–2014. Diversity among speakers (defined using multivariate statistics in terms of the representation of women and non-white people) increased significantly over time during the period studied. This broadening participation may have arisen from interventions to address issues of representation or may simply reflect a generational shift in the demographics of the community. However, on-going problems with data collection and the imbalance in the social cost of identifying as non-religious between different social groups continue to impede efforts to reduce barriers to equality within this growing movement.

Introduction

The number of people both not identifying as religious (a passive non-religiosity)
and actively identifying as non-religious (an active non-religiosity) has increased
over the past 10 years (WIN-Gallup International
Poll 2012). Approximately 16% of the world’s population is
unaffiliated with a religion resulting in the third largest religious
‘affiliation’ on the planet behind Christianity and Islam (Pew Research 2012). Surveys that compare belief
with belonging (i.e. affiliation) show that (in the UK, at least) measuring
religious adherence using data on affiliation over represents religious groups
(Voas and Crockett 2005). For example,
62.1% of respondents in the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) answer
“yes” to the question “do you regard
yourself as belonging to any particular religion?” while only
36.9% when asked “how much difference would you say religious beliefs
make to your life? Would you say they make a little difference, some difference,
a great difference or no difference?” respond with
“some” or “great
difference” (Voas and Crockett
2005). Taken together, these two statistics suggest that while a large
number of UK residents identify with a religion, their worldviews are not
conventionally religious. Furthermore, there is a consistent generational decline in
religiosity in some countries leading to ever-decreasing proportions of people
adhering to religious beliefs (Voas and Crockett
2005).

We distinguish between two groups within the large and growing non-religious
community: (i) the larger pool of “nones” who profess no religion, and
(ii) the atheist, agnostic, secular, and skeptical communities that actively profess
a non-religious worldview. While the former group presents a series of interesting
questions for researchers, such as how nones interact with socio-religious issues in
society and if/where nones find social fulfilment if not through religious
communities, we focus on the latter group of “out” atheists (Anspach, Coe and Thurlow 2007). Some of these
out atheists form communities that are defined by their shared nonbelief, such as
the International Humanist and Ethical Union, which acts as an umbrella group to
almost 100 national membership-based organisations in 37 countries, and which in
turn comprise thousands of local, community-based branches. This multinational group
is open about their lack of religion despite the negative social consequences that
can result in some contexts (Edgell, Gerteis and
Hartmann 2006). Since membership of this community may entail a social
cost for an individual, one should consider both the potential benefits that offset
that cost and if/whether the structure of the community is designed to minimise that
cost. Furthermore, out atheists often reject not only what they view as false
religious beliefs, but also the concomitant negative social conditions they
associate with those beliefs, such as patriarchal social structures and resulting
gender inequality. While atheism, agnosticism, secularism, and skepticism are
distinct identifications, all of these communities have undergone similar
demographic transitions and so we shall follow Miller (2013) in taking them as a single “atheist
community.” We have, therefore, a growing atheist community that is attempting
to define itself without reference to existing religious precepts, and that is
focused upon perceived problems associated with religion in terms of the oppression
of women and minorities.

We propose that the current state of the atheist community can be better understood
by drawing parallels with the better-studied case of academia. However, before
continuing, there are two important pieces of theory to introduce relating to the
subject matter of this paper:

Gatekeepers

Lewin’s Gatekeeper model can help us understand the atheist community and the
academic community it parallels. According to Lewin’s model, the flow of
ideas, behaviours, goods, and the social movement of people through a system or
organisation can follow a large number of potential “channels”
corresponding to particular phenomena (Lewin 1947,
p146). Channels are said to have “gates” where decisions are
made in response to particular confluences of motivating factors, such that the
factors influencing decisions are different before and after the gate. Lewin gives
the example of purchasing an expensive food item: the desire not to waste money (a
motivating factor) initially hinders the purchase of that item, but once the item
has been purchased the same motivation ensures that the item is used to the greatest
benefit. Hence the same motivation of not wishing to waste money reverses its
direction of action depending upon which side of the gate the decision resides.
Since gates act as critical points along channels, Lewin argues that those
individuals with the greatest influence over the decisions made at gates (termed the
“gatekeepers”) are the most significant targets for interventions to
effect behavioural (at a small scale) or systemic (at a larger scale) change. The
gatekeeper metaphor has been explored in a number of cultural settings, including
popular music (Peterson and Berger 1975), the
fashion industry (Hirsch 1972), and
literature (Griswold 1981). In the majority
of cases these gatekeepers are responsible for controlling the flow of cultural
items into the wider environment, but there are particular cases where a cultural
item may be inextricably linked to its creator, producing a situation in which a
creator’s social progress is also tied to the fate of their creation. Perhaps
most relevant among these examples is that of the newsroom, where small groups of
senior editorial staff decide which articles deserve to be placed in the varying
levels of prominence within a publication (Clayman
and Reisner 1998). Clayman and Reisner draw a distinction between the
components of editorial decision making that rely upon objective criteria for
newsworthiness, which account for ~20% of the variance in decisions, and the social
context within which those decisions are made. It is that latter social context that
is central to the concept of gatekeeping, and which appears to play a substantial
role in both the determination of where news stories are placed within a publication
and the resulting exposure for the author. This newsroom situation has a direct
parallel with academia, where the publication of papers, the hiring of academic
staff, and the awarding of grants are decided by small groups of individuals who
each offer personal perspectives on the work being evaluated. Recent work by Van Den
Brink and Benschop (2014) highlights
networking practices among gatekeepers as a potential driver for gender inequality
in academic hiring, emphasising the importance of understanding gatekeepers. The
same process occurs during the development of conference speaker lists, allocating
applicants to different tiers of prestige according to the value of the work,
although this aspect of academia has been little-studied.

Conferences

We argue that a conference presentation, whether academic or lay, is a form of
creative output that is analogous in impact to outputs that are produced and
disseminated through print or other media. As a result, we do not define conferences
as a separate area of research, but as an extension of the wider creative arts. This
view is certainly supported by the UK Research Excellence Framework – the
method of research evaluation common to all UK Higher Education Institutions –
which includes both “conference contributions” and “journal
articles” as accepted outputs (Research
Excellence Framework 2013). Within the academic field of computer
science, conference presentations at leading conferences are equivalent to journal
publications in mid-ranking journals, constituting a substantial contribution to an
academic’s portfolio of work (Freyne et al.
2010). Such outputs are routinely found on resumes and requested as
evidence of academic excellence by probation, tenure, and promotion committees.
While much work has been conducted on the issues surrounding gender, academic
publishing, and academic career progression, the topic of conferences per se has
been neglected, suggesting that more research might be needed. We do know that there
is direct interaction between people at a conference, while written interactions
involve a greater degree of separation. It has been shown, for example, that women
are less likely to ask questions of speakers but more likely to be asked questions
at an astronomical conference (Davenport et al.
2014). Conferences are also opportunities for informal discussion of
ideas (both during presentations and through informal discussions), while written
communication of research findings almost always involves comments on a final
version of record. An additional dimension to the conference experience is that of
networking, whereby social mobility can be enhanced through meeting key
gatekeepers.

Academia as a model for the atheist community

Both the atheist community and academia pride themselves on an empirical perspective
on social justice issues and both tend to be self-governing with little recourse to
external guidance. Evidence has shown that gender discrimination still plagues
academia. At a fundamental level, it appears that there is a devaluing of the
contribution of women (Moss-Racusin et al.
2012), stereotype threat looms large (Ceci, Williams and Barnett 2009), and female researchers tend not to
position themselves so as to achieve their potential (Farrington 2012). These proximate factors are likely the
drivers behind the underrepresentation of women as speakers at academic conferences,
a key component of academic success that contributes to career progression (Van den Brink 2011), in fields such as
primatology (Isbell, Young and Harcourt
2012), evolutionary biology (Schroeder et al.
2013), microbiology (Casadevall and
Handelsman 2014), and theology and religious studies (Guest, Sharma and Song 2013). It is worth
noting, however, that datasets spanning longer time periods suggest that the
increasing representation of women among speakers is an ongoing process and that
present underrepresentation may be a transitory state (Genoways and Freeman 2001). In addition, there seems to be a
lack of predictability about which fields experience gender imbalance. For example,
fields such as astronomy, where women are traditionally less well-represented appear
to have achieved a representative level of participation by women at conferences
(Davenport et al. 2014), while fields such
as primatology, in which women are numerically dominant, have less representation of
women than might be expected (Isbell, Young and
Harcourt 2012). Furthermore, there are correlations between the presence
of women on conference organiser groups and the representation of women at those
conferences (Casadevall and Handelsman 2014),
suggesting a potential (if partial) solution. The selection of researchers to
present their work in front of their peers is a mark of respect and prestige,
particularly in the case of high-profile invited plenary talks. The
underrepresentation of women in these positions of prestige is considered to be
detrimental both to the female researchers who miss an opportunity for career
advancement, but also to the wider community who miss an opportunity to hear about
top quality research. These factors provide a two-fold motivation for fair
representation of women at academic conferences.

There are a number of parallels between this situation in academia and the history of
the atheist movement. The atheist movement originated with a small number of
middle/upper-class white men, who still form the leadership of the majority of
atheist organisations. As in academia, these men act as gatekeepers for the flow of
ideas and the social movement of individuals through the movement (van den Brink and Benschop 2014). The atheist
movement has also traditionally been driven by a small number of superstars
travelling around lecture circuits, largely based in the UK and the USA, by whose
particular ideas and processes become normative (Gibson and Klocker 2004). A good example of this phenomenon of
superstars is the “Four Horsemen”: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam
Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens, whose books have collectively sold
millions of copies in multiple languages. All four are white, well-educated, male,
and residents in the UK or USA. Finally, as in academia, conferences and congresses
play a major role in the atheist community. These conferences can be on a similar
scale to the larger academic conferences, attracting up to 1650 attendees (for The
Amazing Meeting 9 in 2011). However, discussions of the representation of women and
minorities (particularly with respect to race and disability) have involved little
attempt at quantitative analysis of the community. In particular, there are
questions of what constitutes “fair representation” of each group, what
should be done in order to promote those groups that are considered to be
underrepresented, and whether current and past attempts at encouraging
underrepresented groups have been successful. This final issue of an evidence-based
approach to increasing diversity is of particular interest (Pitts 2011). Miller (2013, p
221) defines three problems caused by the lack of qualitative and
quantitative data on women speakers at atheist conferences: “It is
problematic for the atheist movement in terms of attracting more female members;
it is problematic for the women in the movement who are being rendered
invisible; and it is problematic for researchers and writers who are not
documenting and analyzing the full range of atheist communities and
experiences.”

Over recent years, the atheist community has sought to resolve issues of diversity
within the movement. For example, one leading organiser stated in July 2011 that it
was time to “…take diversity seriously, and to make the skeptics
movement a welcoming place for all people, regardless of gender or sex or race
or sexual orientation” (Grothe
2011). These comments were part of a wider discussion that has been
on-going over at least the past six years (for more details, see Miller 2013). In this study we produce a novel
dataset of diversity in the atheist movement and use it to test two key hypotheses:
(i) conference speakers are representative of the wider atheist community, and (ii)
there are discernible trends away from the predominance of white males as leaders in
the atheist community over a 12 year period. We first present a quantitative
analysis of gender differences in atheist communities around the world. We then
provide an analysis of the diversity of speakers at 48 atheist conferences held
between 2003 and 2014 to investigate trends over time in the representation of women
and non-white speakers.

Methods

Global demographic data

While previous analyses of scientific conference speakers have had access to
demographic statistics for their community, few such statistics exist for the
atheist community. In an attempt to establish a baseline gender ratio within the
movement, we analysed census data from the United Nations Statistics Division
“Population by religion, sex and urban/rural residence” collection
(http://data.un.org, access date
21/03/2014). These data include 15,809 records of census entries for 96
countries or areas, under 385 religious classifications. While the atheist
communities of different countries may fall into different classifications
depending on the categories found on census forms, we selected the following
categories as being most likely to be relevant to the atheist community:
“Agnostic”, “Atheist”, “No Afiliation”
[sic], “No Religion”, “Non-believers”,
“None”, and “None or Refused”. We acknowledge that this
may appear to be a rather large pool of potential respondents from which to
characterise an “atheist” community, but as we discuss above the
number of people identifying as non-religious is still likely to under represent
the true number of atheists in many populations due to large differences between
a sense of belonging and belief (Voas and
Crockett 2005). Indeed, work carried out on the UK census suggests
that respondents are “…ambivalent about their religious
identities until the census questions were read out to them. Presented with
a list of options, their identity suddenly crystallised in a way that seemed
to suggest not that they were, for example, Christian but – perhaps
more importantly – that they were not one of the
‘others’.” (Day
and Lee 2014, p346). We therefore view data from any census as only a
vague approximation of true patterns of religiosity, but feel that any
identification with a non-religious identity (that of the
“other” to which Day and Lee refer) in such
census data is more likely to correlate with an atheistic worldview simply
because of the requirement for substantial personal investment, in many
contexts, in any view that is not religious. The raw data were analysed in R
(R Development Core Team 2013) which
was used to remove all religious classifications other than those mentioned
previously, to remove any breakdown according to urban/rural residence (leaving
only “total”), and to leave only data for males and females
individually rather than both combined. In some cases, countries had multiple
censuses and so the most recent was selected in each case. The sex ratio of the
atheist community (defined by those categories above) was calculated for each
census in each country. It is worth noting that the United States census does
not ask about religion and so data for the US was obtained from surveys (Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life
2008). Data were available for 67 countries and regions including the US
(summary data are available in Table S1). A two-sampled, two-tailed t-test was
used to test whether the sex ratios of international atheist communities were
significantly different from the sex ratios of their respective countries
(obtained from the CIA World Factbook, Central
Intelligence Agency 2014).

Conference diversity data

Data on attendance at atheist conferences were obtained from websites, brochures,
and in a small number of cases by contacting conference organisers directly. We
extracted data for 48 conferences held between 2003 and 2014 (dates and names of
conferences are available in Table S2), with a total of 1223 speaker slots and
630 different speakers. For each speaker, we searched online resources for
biographical details related to (i) gender, (ii) age at time of conference,
(iii) race, (iv) nationality, and (v) education. When not explicitly mentioned
in biographical data, we made reasonable assumptions for gender based on name or
photograph, age estimated as 21 years prior to the speaker’s undergraduate
degree award, nationality based on biographical details (such as alma mater),
and race from photographs or on name and nationality. Further, we classified
education along an ordinal scale as follows: high school=1; some college=1.5;
unknown=2; bachelor’s degree=2; law degree=3; master’s degree=3;
some doctoral education =3.5; doctorate=4. We assigned speakers whose
educational level was unknown the same rating as speakers with a
bachelor’s degree because the overwhelming majority of speakers held a
bachelor’s degree or higher. Data are available in Table S3.

As with previous studies of this kind (e.g. Davenport et al. 2014), we made a number of assumptions during the
collation of publicly available data. First, the use of a binary gender variable
assumes that all participants identify as male or female, and the gender
variable represents the gender that the speakers identify with. Second, using a
binary white or non-white variable is bound to omit a large number of hidden
minorities whose race is not immediately apparent from their appearance or is
not dominant in their place of origin. In both cases we regret the blunt nature
of the analysis and would welcome any suggestions as to how to improve future
analyses. Clearly, in both cases, the method of evaluation used to collect data
reflects the perceptions of the authors with their attendant assumptions and
experiences. However, we feel that while objectively inaccurate in some cases,
this subjective method has merit for the purpose of this analysis.

We present descriptive statistics of the race, education, and age of male and
female speakers separately and as a group (statistics for each conference can be
seen in Table S4). While gender and race are of primary concern here, we also
conduct a composite measure of diversity based on Gower distances on the traits
(gender, age, education, nationality, race) to account for the mixture of
quantitative and qualitative traits (Laliberté and Legendre 2010). These data were then summarised
to give a single diversity value for each conference using Rao’s quadratic
entropy statistic (Rao 1982). Rao’s
statistic takes the sum of the squared distances between the speakers in
multivariate space. We calculate three key response variables for each of the 48
conferences: the proportion of female speakers, the proportion of non-white
speakers, and the diversity based on Rao’s index. These are then analysed
using Spearman’s rank correlations to test for an association between each
response variable and the date of the conference to which the data relate. We
further examine the effect of the identity of the organisation that was
facilitating the conferences, using mixed effects models with date as a linear
predictor and organiser as a random effect. R code for all analyses is available
on request from the corresponding author.

Results

Global demographic data

Sex ratios within global atheist communities were available for 67 countries or
areas, which ranged in their atheist populations from 0 (the small island of St
Helena in 2008) to >60,000,000 (Vietnam, which is officially an atheist
nation with 81% of its population declaring themselves to be non-religious). The
proportions of those populations made up of women ranged from 0.272 (Monserrat)
to 0.571 (Tonga), with an average of 0.423 and a lower and upper 95% confidence
interval of 0.409 and 0.438, respectively. In the UK and the US, the two
countries with the largest number of conferences in the dataset, the population
sex ratios (M: F) were 1.03 and 1, while the corresponding sex ratios among
atheists were 1.26 and 1.44, respectively. A two-sampled, paired t-test showed
that on average the proportion of women identifying as atheist (based on the
classifications outline in the methods) was significantly lower than would be
expected given the sex ratios of the 67 countries (t=-8.543, p<0.001). The
high levels of atheism in Vietnam raise the issue of affiliation and belief that
we highlighted in the introduction. However, Vietnam is the only nation in our
data which has been declared an atheist state, and the omission of Vietnam from
the analysis does not affect the result of the analysis (mean proportion of
female atheists=0.428; 95% confidence intervals 0.415–0.442; this ratio is
still significantly different from 0.5: t=-10.276, p<0.001).

Conference diversity data

Table 1 shows a breakdown of conference
participants first by gender and then by age, education, and race. The total
proportion of speakers who were female was 0.305, considerably below the 95%
confidence intervals for the global community. The total number of speaker slots
taken by women was 0.316, which is also significantly below our estimates of the
global proportion of women identifying as atheists (Figure 1). There was a significant, positive relationship between
the date of each conference and the proportion of women presenting (rho=0.623,
p<0.001), the proportion of non-white people presenting (rho=0.482, p=0.001),
and the overall diversity of speakers (rho=0.499, p<0.001; see Figure 2). When the identity of conference
organisers was taken into account, the significant temporal trend was still seen
in diversity (F(1,31–46)=14.275, p<0.0005), proportion
non-white (F(1,31–46)=4.275, p<0.050), and proportion female
(F(1,31–46)=12.756, p<0.005). Note that three
conferences were comprised entirely of female speakers (the Women in Secularism
Conferences, “WISC”). Due to concerns over whether these conferences
might bias the results for female representation and overall diversity, analyses
were repeated without those three conferences. With those conferences omitted,
there is still a significant increase in the proportion of women presenting
(rho=0.584, p<0.001) and the overall diversity of conferences (rho=0.618,
p<0.001) over time.

Table 1

Demographic data for 630 speakers at 48 atheist conferences between 2002
and 2014.

Males

Females

Total

Mean age (±SE)

49.03 (0.03)

43.91 (0.07)

47.46 (0.56)

Education

High school (%)

50 (11.4)

18 (9.4)

68 (10.8)

Bachelors (%)

147 (33.6)

77 (40.1)

224 (35.6)

Masters (%)

53 (12.1)

30 (12.1)

83 (13.2)

Doctorate (%)

172 (39.3)

62 (39.3)

234 (37.1)

Unknown (%)

16 (3.7)

5 (2.6)

21 (3.3)

Race

White

383

156

539

Non-white

51

35

86

Unknown

4

1

5

Total

438

192

630

Figure 1

Gender ratios in the wider atheist community calculated from
international census data (solid horizontal line represents mean, dotted
lines give 95% confidence intervals) compared against the proportion of
speakers and speaking slots at 48 atheist conferences.

Figure 2

Changing demographics in speakers at 48 atheist conferences over time:
(A) changes in the proportion of non-white speakers, (B) changes in the
proportion of female speakers, and (C) changes in overall speaker
diversity based on age, gender, race, nationality and education.

Discussion

Affirmative action and a wider awareness of gender bias have brought about huge
changes in the representation of women in society over the past century (Blau and Kahn 2007). However, addressing the
final stages of gender equality is likely to be the hardest as this relies on
tackling indirect and implicit biases (Farrington
2012). Here, we show that the same is true for the atheist community,
which has succeeded in significantly increasing the representation of not only women
but also non-white members of the community at prestigious conferences. The
conclusions are based on a substantial analysis of a large number of conferences
using an ecological approach to calculating diversity.

Previous examples of successful attempts to increase diversity at conferences have
rested on the institution of specific rules for the conference, such as the
incorporation of women onto panels to select speakers (Casadevall and Handelsman 2014). However, much of the work
toward greater diversity at conferences has been held back by the absence of a
systematic method of data collection. While we were able to find a number of
suggestions as to how to redress the gender balance in academia (with potential
application of those suggestions to a range of other arenas), we did not come across
any reports of on-going empirical tests of those interventions. A further problem
arises with demographic inertia in diversity, whereby notable individuals within a
group remain notable and new individuals require time to establish themselves. Hence
the six members of the all-male speaker list at the first conference in our dataset
(The Amazing Meeting in 2003) have 23 speaking appearances between them. While
demographic inertia can be accounted for using models of academic career paths, it
is unclear how this could be incorporated into models of speaker history in the case
of the atheist community (Shaw and Stanton
2012).

It is clear from both the composition of the global community, based on demographic
data, and the composition of the leadership in the atheist movement, based on the
subset of the community selected to speak at conferences, that white men still
dominate. Miller (2013) has suggested that
this preponderance of white males in the movement is due to the cost associated with
living openly as an atheist in many communities. Certainly the costs associated with
being “out” as an atheist are manifold: there is a substantial component
of wider societal mistrust of atheists, even compared to other groups such as Jews,
Catholics, African Americans, and homosexuals who have traditionally been victims of
discrimination (Edgell, Gerteis and Hartmann
2006). Research has revealed the many forms that anti-atheist
discrimination takes, including verbal abuse, social ostracism, and coercion into
performing religious acts (Hammer et al.
2012). Meanwhile, atheists, agnostics, and the unchurched in general may
suffer from a lack of social support (Baker and Smith
2009). However, while these sorts of studies provide a deeply negative
view of life as an atheist, it is worth noting that the costs are
situation-dependent and frequently represent little burden to those who already
enjoy a degree of societal privilege. For example, in the study of Hammer et al.
(2012) frequencies of serious
discrimination (e.g. denial of goods or services, hate crimes) were <10% across
the survey of 1,038 participants, while the most common discrimination was being
asked to take part in religious rituals (75–80% reported at least one
instance) or seeing anti-atheist comments in the media (95% reported at least one
instance). It is highly likely that the social costs vary with geography, due to
variation in levels of religiosity, and that those members of society with
sufficient privilege are capable of bearing that cost more easily, which may explain
the socio-demographic similarities within groups of individuals identifying as
atheists (Pasquale 2012). A recent study
provided evidence that identifying as “atheist” may produce
anti-religious discrimination in line with discrimination against Christians, Jews,
and Pagans, while not mentioning religion removed this discrimination (Wright et al. 2013). The issue over how
atheists are perceived in the context of wider religious identification and the
notion of “believers” vs. “others” requires more
attention.

Next steps

So what can we learn from the theoretical framework and empirical approach described
above? There appear to be a few clear courses of action for those who wish to
promote greater diversity based on the central principles of the gatekeeper model
and more recent work on the sociological study of academia:

Monitoring prior to intervention – the substantial amount of work
involved in searching for equality data on past conference participants
demonstrates the lack of consistent and comprehensive methods for the
evaluation of any future interventions. Indeed this has been observed in a
number of previous studies as well, which have used informal methods of data
gathering (e.g. observations of presented gender of speakers, Casadevall and Handelsman 2014; Davenport et al. 2014). If the
collection of such data was conducted using best practices for human
research, and coordinated through an institutional ethical review board from
the outset then this data could provide a fascinating insight into questions
of equality at conferences and other events, as well as the effectiveness of
equality interventions in general. Such monitoring is essential in the
absence of randomised controlled trials to deliver top quality evidence.

Use evidence-based interventions – while there is a general lack of
data on the effectiveness of particular interventions, there have been a
number of propositions for reduction in gender bias. In particular,
interventions should be grounded in theory, should involve active learning
on the part of participants, and should avoid assigning blame to prevent
excessive backlash (Moss-Racusin et al.
2014). Interventions should also be clear about their outcome
measures, such as increasing awareness, decreasing implicit and explicit
bias, and promoting positive behavioural change (Moss-Racusin et al. 2014).

Target and diversify gatekeepers – while not experimentally controlled,
there is evidence from observational studies that the number of female
gatekeepers (in this case conference organisers) increases the
representation of women speaking at conferences (Casadevall and Handelsman 2014). As has been highlighted
for editorial newsrooms (Clayman and Reisner
1998), there is frequently a lack of transparency over the
processes involved in the selection and promotion of members of communities
to prominent positions (e.g. conference speakers). Gatekeepers (both male
and female) therefore represent important candidates for study, and a
primary target for the sort of evidence-based interventions described
above.

We hope that we have demonstrated the value of diversity monitoring in the atheist
community and we encourage the organisers of future conferences or past conferences
that have not been included in this paper to contact the corresponding author with
conference program details and speaker biographies. Given the relatively close links
between organisers of conferences within fields (be it academia or atheism), there
should be scope for a consistent recording schema for the on-going evaluation of
diversity in invited and presenting speakers at conferences. By way of example, all
of the data used in this analysis are available as supplementary data to this paper
and we hope that they are of use to organisers in future work towards studying the
role of equality in conference participation
(http://figshare.com/articles/Increasing_diversity_in_emerging_non_religious_communities_data_/1264995).

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